


See? I'm Real.

by TheIcyQueen



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Born From A Wish, Character Study, Gen, Heaven's Night, Pre-Silent Hill 2, allusions to suffocation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 02:18:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17316206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: She wakes up cold and alone, with silence and memory lurking just outside of her periphery. She has to stay, despite her fear and her dread--she has to wait, to be patient, to just believe. Because she knows he's coming for her.But he's looking for the her that isn't her at all.





	See? I'm Real.

When she first opens her eyes, it’s with the gasp of a drowning woman breaking the water’s surface. Her eyes are burning with tears and cold sweat, and for the briefest of instants, she can still taste a scream on the back of her tongue. The dream is slipping from her, now, escaping as quickly as water from cupped palms, but she can still remember the dark, the terror, the weight of the pillow as it was pressed to her face. It’s becoming a familiar specter, ghastly and sepia-toned, and she finds herself unable to remember a time before its presence.  
  
She allows herself a moment to breathe, savoring each deep inhalation as though distrusting her lungs. There’s a pounding in her head, deep and red and throbbing, but she chalks it up to last night’s hangover and gets up to wipe away her running mascara and the brackish claw marks it’s raking down her cheeks. The heels of her boots click hollowly through the empty hallway, and she shivers with the chill of silence, oppressive and knowing. These walls have never known fear, only desire and need, and she wonders if it’s always been so _still._  
  
The door creaks as she pushes on it, but there’s no one around to object to the noise. There is no deep bass line thrumming through the walls, no scurried footfalls on the floor, no catcalls or whistles in the air. For now, there is only her and the weight of the nightmare. She expects there to be someone lounging in the overstuffed armchair as she enters the room, though who or why she can’t be sure. But it, too, sits vacant and lonely. She wonders if it’s all in her mind, or if that’s a hint of cologne wafting by.  
  
Bending over the table, she takes in her reflection, swiping away tear tracks with practiced ease. Her eyeliner will need some fixing, and her hair is in desperate need of combing, but the rest is salvageable. The club is empty, but there’s no telling when he might come looking for her. Her brow furrows at the thought of him, the corners of her mouth tucking down into something much less alluring than her smile. She still doesn’t know who he is or why she should know him, but she knows he’s coming soon. It’s all on the tip of her tongue, the very edge of her memory, but dwelling on it only adds to the incessant ache in her skull.  
  
He’s coming to save her, though. She knows it just as surely as she knows there are things out there in the fog—just as surely as she knows those things are not her friends. It only took one stumbled encounter to make that realization, alone out there in the hazy streets. She doesn’t like the way they walk, hips and torsos undulating perversely. She doesn’t like the sounds they make, gasping and screaming and squelching across the pavement. Mostly, though, she doesn’t like how they look, when obscured by the mist, when their darkened silhouettes could be mistaken for her own shadow.  
  
She isn’t a monster. Not as far as she knows, anyway. She is beginning to suspect, though, that she’s going a little crazy. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot call to mind the last time she’s seen another living person, another face with two eyes instead of a gaping, hungry void. There are times where she finds herself believing she’s _never_ seen another person, that there has never _been_ another person here for her to know. But somewhere, there are memories of laughter, of smiles, of quiet conversation as the glassy waters of Lake Toluca ripple in the wind. And still yet, _names_. They come to her, sometimes, unheeded and unwarranted, filling her with strange colors and forgotten scents, long-lost shapes just out of her fingertips’ reach. They’re becoming old friends, just like the nightmare, pressing close from behind, threatening to envelope the little of her that still remains.  
  
There are giggles, now and again; tiny sounds that make her start until she realizes they were only in her mind. It’s a child’s voice, she knows somehow, though Heaven’s Night is no place for children. It fills her with a sad, strange longing of sorts, the little laugh. Lilting and lovely as it lulls her like some lost litany. It tugs at her chest, makes her smile and sigh all at once. It sounds like love and it sounds like loss, and she can’t help but feel as though she’s forgetting something important. Occasionally it brings with it the smell of bleach and plague, feeling somehow sterile, somehow scoured.  
  
It’s times like those she remembers the rattle in her chest. She never affords it much thought; she’s always been perfectly healthy. If anything, it’s a cold brought on by too many long nights, one too many drinks, perhaps the occasional satisfied cigarette. Women like her don’t get too terribly sick, pestilence does not strike down the young or the beautiful, as far as she’s seen, and she is undeniably _both._  
  
It’s the reason she keeps herself locked up so tight, now, within the perfumed walls of the club. Dying is for the old, the ugly, the wicked. And while she makes no claims against the latter, she has no immediate plans to die. She will run, she will hide, she will _fight_ , if it comes to that…but not die. No, she will _never_ allow herself to die. Not here, amid the memories of billfolds and sweat; not out there, surrounded by monsters that seem, at first, too much like people; not in the dark, not in the cold, not laid up in some hospital bed. She _will not die_. He will not allow it.  
  
Her head buzzes again, at the thought of him, the impossible feel of his skin against her memory. The way he smells after a shower, the smile he saves just for her, that day out on the lake they never spent together. The ache behind her eyes throbs warningly. But if she tries—really _tries_ —she can just almost see his face, see his eyes, see the way his mouth curves around the contours of her name. _Mary._  
  
_“No,”_ she says suddenly, not breaking the silence so much as annihilating it, staring deep into the chilly eyes of her reflection. “My name…is _Maria.”_  
  
As far as she knows.

**Author's Note:**

> Reupload from 4/13/14.


End file.
